Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: l'artiste expose ses oeuvres

Simultaneously with the Museum of Modern Art, Ethan Cohen Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the world-renowned African Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923 – 2014). Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA, calls Bouabré “one of the most accomplished African artists of the last century” in the introduction to the Museum's 'survey show' that tracks the chronological arc of Bouabré's 40-year artistic career beginning roughly in 1980. Thus the MoMA show, by necessity, focuses preponderantly on earlier decades. The Ethan Cohen Gallery show, composed of pieces from the gallerist's private collection, presents more contemporary works from well into the new century when Bouabré had full control of his style and purpose.

Bouabré received a Francophone education when Ivory Coast was still a French colony. As a colonial employee researching the ethnography of his region in the late 1950s, he developed an interest in creating a unique written alphabet – what he called a 'syllabary' - for the oral language of his tribe, the Bété. His experimentation with an ideographic system of Bété linguistic fragments evolved into his long-term artistic medium of polychrome representational drawings on palm-sized recycled cardstock cut out by hand. Using pencil, colored pencil, and pen, Bouabré's work features a distinctive symbolistic iconography of stylized humans, animals, cosmological and magical creatures, and objects often in kinesis, with his hand-written comments and titles inscribed in French along the periphery of each card. Distantly evocative of Tarot, the works have both a naif quality and cultural sophistication visually rooted in African morphology with a message of global amity. Implicit in every work, in coherent sets, in the narrative arc of his entire mature output, is an interpenetrated world-view, a metaphysics and an idealistic morality.

Bouabré's oeuvre centers on imagery that explicitly places identifiable African themes and figures in harmony with those of other continents. His message is one of global diversity and unity, a vision of the human landscape as universal and mutual – presciently envisioned decades before it became commonplace for ethnic groups to share countries and cultures. To that end, his cards feature nudes of different races in comparable poses, in fraternity, in sexual acts, and elemental actions illustrating moments of universal consciousness. His iconography and writing allegorizes Bouabré's ever-present philosophy of humankind's community of love, brotherhood, beauty, and eroticism.

In the Ethan Cohen Gallery show, a series of ten cards shows us women of all skin colors in childbirth, their lands itemized in writing, illustrating both the joy and pain of the inescapable human condition. Nearby is a set of cards featuring sexual union between interracial couples, between two men, and even between two elephants. Such is the undifferentiated law of nature, the artist seems to say, that we can choose either to suffer or celebrate our lot. It's a vision of patterns discerned in the order of things that adds up to a metaphysics rising to a wholistic cosmology. On the Wall of Divinity and Mystery in the gallery show are displayed cards featuring planets and stars, oranges resembling the round earth and bananas inscribed by shapes like embryos or continents juxtaposed to articulate the artist's ontology. There are magical objects and symbols with magical powers, a quasi-witch holding up a kind of cauldron, a cycloptic figure with a red third eye, a simple Christian cross. Bouabré is searching for the hidden power behind things, the secrets to our creation and his own. Philosopher, visual artist, poet and mystic, he strives to articulate the universal truths that bind us together across races, species, continents and aeons.